There is a bug with HP FlexFabric 650FLB adapters on HP Gen 9 blades. Buggy firmware prevents HBA from properly negotiating FC protocols. HBA will fail to initiate the PLOGI (Port Login) process. Symptoms on Brocade FC switch will show FC4 type as “none” and switch would fail to detect it as initiator.
If you have Brocade switch it can be confirmed via portloginshow # command, where # is the port number where blade is connected.

Today browsing one of my favorite 3PAR related websites (3parug.com) I came across topic asking for a “real” free space. I assume someone is trying to find out how more of the actual data he/she can fit before running out of space.

Before we answer this question lets take a look at different “layers” of free space.
1. Physical Drive space
Let’s take for example 900GB FC drive. Inside 3PAR MC it will report as Total Capacity of 819GB. On the other hand 900GB SSD will report Total Capacity 852GB.
Note: I don’t have information (formula) on how Total Capacity derived from capacity reported by HD manufactures.

Now let’s take a look what is used within Total Capacity You can view it by issuing showpd -space command.
– Size – total size described above
– Volume – how much space is actually used by Volumes
– Spare – space used by spare chunklets
– Free – space available for Volumes
Now let’s look at MC:
Total Capacity = Size
Free Capacity = Free
Allocated Capacity = Volume + Spare

2. CPG space
In order to “use” PD space described above you need to assign drive to one CPG. CPG creates underlaying RAID from chunklets (1GB in size). So for example CPG with 5 – Data 1 – Parity will consume 6 GB of Free Capacity on physical drives for each 5GB of data.

In 3PAR MC you can view remaining free space:

Estimated Free System Space should give a good indication on how much “real” free space (after RAID parity) remains on your 3PAR for a given CPG.

Please remember with Thin Volumes you can over-provision space as 3PAR’s ASIC removes all “zeros” on the fly.

Hello, we have another VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) bug. This time it’s with Command on SRM server and Powershell scripts.

I am not SRM developer but it seems SRM itself parses commands before passing it to Windows OS for execution. Sometimes it causes issues.
Let’s take a look at this line:c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -Command "(Invoke-Command -ComputerName REMOTEPC -FilePath "C:\SRM\test1.ps1")"

In the example above we are executing Powershell script on remote host (REMOTEPC). Everything looks standard and it works if you run it directly in the Windows Operating System.

Conclusion
My ticket is still open with VMware and engineering team is currently investigating. You will be affected by this bug if your script’s file path name contains spaces. You need to wrap it with quotes.

There is a “well known” bug in VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.8 (SRM), which puts your DR plan at risk. It will only affect if you have vCenters connected in Linked mode. Well, let me put it this way: when you have Site Disaster – you will not meet your RTO.

Luckily for us we caught this bug during our latest DR testing.

If you have two vCenters in Linked mode and would like to confirm this bug please bring down vCenter in you Production site down, log into vCenter at DR site and try to run recovery. You will see this:

Additionally in SRM log you will see the following errors:2014-11-29T10:01:05.750-05:00 [03060 error 'HttpConnectionPool-000000'] [ConnectComplete] Connect failed to fqdn-prodvcenter:80>; cnx: (null), error: class Vmacore::Http::HttpException(HTTP error response: Service Unavailable)Workaround
VMware Engineer confirmed this bug and said currently they don’t have a fix. Removing Linked mode between vCenters is the workaround.

1. On the recovery site vCenter Server, point to Start -> All Programs -> vCenter Server Linked Mode Configuration.
2. Click Next, select Modify Linked Mode configuration and click Next.
3. Ensure that the checkbox Isolate this vCenter Server instance from Linked Mode group is selected and click Next.
4. Click Continue to isolate the vCenter Server.
5. When the wizard has completed, check that the Site Recovery Manager service is still running and start it if necessary.

Conclusion
It seems VMware under a lot of pressure from Microsoft to shorten release cycle for their products. I can’t believe QA team missed such a huge bug.

You have a PowerShell script designed to run locally, but you need to execute it on remote computer via another product such as VMware Site Recovery Manager . You need to keep all your scripts in central repository but you need to execute them on multiple servers. Does this sound familiar? Here’s quick and nice trick:

HP has amazing product called 3par but it’s definitely lucking some features on add-on software side.

One of the products HP offers is called HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for Microsoft SQL Server (RM-SQL). Purpose of this software is to provide rapid on-site “backup” and not DR (in my experience majority of folks in HP don’t understand what this product does). I am not going into details how this software works but to give you a brief summary: it uses 3PAR hardware VSS provider to create application consistent snapshots and replicates them to another remote 3PAR SAN or stores them on 3PAR SAN locally.

You might think it does achieve objectives of DR but don’t be fooled. You are unable to restore replicated snapshots to a DR SQL server – the can only be restored to the same SQL server (you need to zone the same server to both 3PAR systems). Silly if you ask me as it seems to be solo software restriction.

Our objective for this exercise is DR for physical SQL servers hosted on 3PAR SAN. Additionally, we need to achieve low RTO and RPO. I am not describing on how to configure HP 3PAR RM-SQL to get data across to DR site. Continue reading →

“HP has released a very serious customer advisory saying that some Broadcom Nics which are used in G2-G6 servers and blades could be killed by a firmware update component in their HP Service Pack for Proliant 2014.02.

Using HPSUM, HP SPP or Smart Components for VMware to update the “Comprehensive Configuration Management” (CCM) firmware version to 7.8.21 can kill the nics which would require a hardware swap out to fix!”

If your server is out of warranty or you just don’t want to wait for hardware swap please read below. You need access to the server via remote management such as KVM or iLO. Of course, if you’re lucky you can perform this operation locally. In this post I will demonstrate how to recover BL460c G1 blade with bricked HP NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter.